Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson Jr. (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was an American politician who was the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. He was the first president to be a Democrat and is on the twenty-dollar bill. His nickname was "Old Hickory."

He struggled against banks and secessionists and forced many Native Americans to leave their homeland so that white people could live there. Many died and got diseases in what is called the Trail of Tears.

Andrew Jackson was born in Waxhaws, in the Carolinas, on March 15, 1767.

As a boy, Jackson was a messenger for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The British caught and mistreated him.

Jackson studied law as a teenager and passed the bar exam at the age of 20.^[1]

He was the first U.S. president who was not born into a rich family. He did not have a college education. He moved to Tennessee and became a politician.

During the War of 1812, he became a general and won the Battle of New Orleans, which made him very famous. He joined the war because of the childhood trauma that he had endured during the Revolutionary War. Both his mother and his brother died during the war, and Jackson blamed the British and wanted revenge for his late loved ones.

In 1791, he fell in love with Rachel Donelson Robards. They went through a marriage ceremony. However, the marriage was not legal because she had not been granted a divorce from her first husband. They married legally three years later. They had no children but adopted several. He became rich and owned a large plantation.

In the 1790s Jackson was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S Senate, and the Tennessee Supreme Court. In 1823, he returned to the Senate.

Jackson reorganized the Democratic Party and became its leader.

In 1824, he ran against John Quincy Adams but lost after Adams agreed to appoint the candidate Henry Clay as Secretary of State. Jackson and his supporters thought that he had lost because of a "corrupt bargain."

In 1828, he finally defeated President Adams in the election of 1828 and became president on March 4, 1829, aged 61, and four years later, aged 65, he was inaugurated for a second term as president.

During the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833, South Carolina threatened secession from the United States. Jackson threatened war but later compromised with the state.

As president, Jackson believed that the Adams administration had been corrupt. Jackson initiated investigations into all executive departments. they revealed that $280,000 (equivalent to $8,000,000 in 2023) had been stolen from the Treasury. They also resulted in a reduction in costs to the Department of the Navy, which saved $1 million (equivalent to $28,600,000 in 2023). Jackson asked Congress to tighten laws on embezzlement and tax evasion, and he pushed for an improved government accounting system. In January 1835, at the age of 67, Jackson was almost assassinated when an unemployed painter wanted to shoot him but both his guns jammed.^[2] He is the first president to have gone undergone an assassination attempt.^[2]

In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which allowed the federal government to force the Native Americans to move from their land and go west. Many Native Americans were killed, some by violence, and the path that they walked to get west is called the Trail of Tears.

Jackson was against the national bank because he felt that banks and their banknotes were for rich and powerful people and did not serve the interests of the common man. The national bank expired during Jackson's presidency. He chose not to continue the bank.

On March 4, 1837, at the age of 69, Jackson finished his second term. He was replaced by Vice-President Martin Van Buren, who had been elected president in 1836 and continued much of Jackson's. Jackson maintined a large influence on other Democrats during the 19th centrury.

Jackson died on June 8, 1845 in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 78 from tuberculosis.

Jackson's legacy among historians is mixed and heavily debated. Some have liked him because he was against aristocrats, bankers, businessmen, the British Empire, cities, and paper money and for ordinary country people. Some have disliked him for the same reasons and because he was for war and against Native Americans.

• Jackson's White House biography Archived 2015-01-08 at the Wayback Machine